Life-long belief patterns don’t break by wishing them away. Patterns change when the original event that caused hurt becomes apparent, consciously. Locating the actual event is sometimes tricky to find, or it’s something you talk about often. It’s not something obvious; instead, it’s behind an obvious experience. Look deeper and dialogue with any hurt feelings. See if you can find what caused you to push away from love.
We aren’t conscious of all the times we push away from love, and it’s done unconsciously more often than not. A person may not have ever experienced being in love, so when love appears, they end up sabotaging the connection. Or become too polarized in their thinking, which ends up pushing love away.
Sabotaging love is common. It’s part of the “What Will People Think” patterning and a punishment pattern. People live their lives to please others and completely forget about their own needs and wants in life. Living life for others is called wearing a mask. People wear masks because of shame, disliking themselves and not feeling good enough. They pretend to be someone else and live a facade instead of being true to themselves.
I see masks on people all the time. You might wear the “wife” or “husband” mask or “father” or “mother” mask. There’s also “good employee” mask. Masks aren’t bad or wrong but can stop you from enjoying life. One day you’ll wake up, especially after the children leave and wonder what the heck happened to my life.
As a spiritual person and walking a spiritual path or awakening path living YOUR life is fundamentally important to self-realization. You can’t keep lying to yourself or others–truth has a way of seeping out of the corners of your life eventually. In other words, destructive patterns like unhappiness, sadness, depression and anger lingering under the surface are tell-tale signs of mask wearers. Why? Because they aren’t living their own life and it shows.
Co-dependency is also a sign of not living your life. A person is co-dependent on another person for happiness or approval. Co-dependent relationships usually show up in long-term commitments or marriages. The author, Terry Cole wrote a book called Boundary Boss; you can check out how co-dependency plays havoc on lives.
Remedy
Living your life means knowing your inner self. You can’t avoid how you feel and know yourself. You must tap into the emotional well and learn how to regulate your emotional feelings–for both men and women. It’s one of the key steps in Buddhism is to gain control over emotions. Not to deny emotions or stuff emotions deeper into the body, but to honestly deal with how you feel and think about anything in life. Men generally don’t live from an emotional center, whereas women do. Women are more in tune with how they feel in any given situation, but not always.
Proper meditation is to gain control over emotions. Meditation is to resolve emotions–feelings and the mental trappings of emotions. When you feel energy in the heart and your heart opens for the first time it’s an amazing feeling of inspiration. Instead of overthinking the feeling keep it in the heart and sit with it, gain wisdom form it. Try not to overthink love.
Have the courage to take off any masks and live your life. It’s so much easier to deal with people who do. No one will criticize you unless you judge yourself. No one is perfect. Living your life shame-free and content takes addressing the inner self and becoming self-aware about your feelings and life.